Fortune Telling & Free Speech

In an act of complete self-indulgence, I decided to do my final(?) blog post on something that didn't involve Nazis or alt-right conservatives or acts of blood-boiling injustices (at least hopefully, ahaha): fortune telling. Fortune telling is actually a pretty controversial issue in regards to free speech laws, but first, a little history.

Card fortune telling, or cartomancy, as we know it today is often traced back to 16th/17th century French woman Marie Anne Lenormand, who rose to fame among social elites of the time and gave readings to people such as the wife of Napolean, Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat. However, fortune telling has existed long before Lenormand, popping up in ancient Chinese, Egyptian, and Babylonian history. Fortune telling has a paradoxical relationship with religion, as many (especially the Catholic church) find it blasphemous to claim to know a future that only God can know, but at the same time fortune telling is often based off religious ideas and can even serve as a way for people to become interested in joining a religion.

Fortune telling can at times shift from a fun tourist attraction to a predatory way of making money, falling into the same category mediums and most televangelists are put into in that they can use a vulnerable person's beliefs against them and scam them out of a lot of assets. This has influenced some states in the US to outlaw fortune telling or prohibit people to engage in this kind of activity under the name "fortune teller." In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, it is a misdemeanor to claim that you actually have the power to tell the future and require payment to do so; one can only charge money for fortune telling if it is made clear that it is just entertainment.

Many fortune tellers have used the free speech defense when accused of illegal activity, but courts have largely ruled against them in the past. Davis v. The State of Ohio, a case that made it to the Ohio Supreme Court, upheld that Gertrude Davis was guilty of fortune telling even though she argued she was participating in freedom of expression. The Supreme Court denied hearing about the Davis case and has not had a case dedicated to the legality of fortune telling, the closest they came to it was the 2015 Reed v Town of Gilbert case where the Court ruled it was unconstitutional to discriminate against signs based on the content of them. This is related because many fortune-telling bans are rooted in regulating based on content, so there's a chance if a case were to make it to the Supreme Court it would be ruled unconstitutional to ban fortune tellers.

Even without the Supreme Court's ruling, however, some states have recently gone back on previous rulings against fortune telling. In 1998, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Nebraska could not enforce a law banning fortune telling in the case Argello v. City of Lincoln. In Rushman v. City of Milwaukee, a similar ban was denied, the court there saying that "if the City could ban any statement or belief debunked by science, the First Amendment would be a cruel hoax."

Do you think that bans on fortune telling violate free speech/expression? Do you think states have good reason for banning fortune telling? I'd love to know what you think!

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/fortune-telling

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1111/fortune-telling#:~:text=In%20Davis%20v.,all%20criminal%20or%20civil%20responsibility.%E2%80%9D

https://daily.jstor.org/surprising-historical-significance-fortune-telling/